


Rightful Places

by Tallulah



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Childhood, Gen, Growing Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 15:01:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11187579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tallulah/pseuds/Tallulah
Summary: The Games have always been there, for as long as Effie can remember.





	Rightful Places

The Games have always been there, for as long as Effie can remember. Of course when she was very little she didn't really understand them. There were children who weren't like her – dark, thin, serious children – and every year there was a new set, and the older children at school had their favourites. She watched it even then, but she can admit that when she was very little, she found it quite boring. She'd bring dolls or toy animals: peacocks with real feathers, glittery tigers, and play her own Games in front of the television. 

At school, when the Games were on it was all they talked about. Effie and her friends would choose one of the boy tributes to decide to have a crush on, or they'd form themselves into a secret club to root for one of the girls. They were allowed to watch the Games in class, and every year they did a project on the uprising and the Dark Days and how the Capitol had saved everyone. Effie was the best at drawing and making things look pretty, so her pictures always went up on the walls.

As they got older, liking the Games stopped being something they were doing to copy the grown-ups and became something real. The crushes became real. In every class there was someone taking bets, and you didn't just want your favourite tribute to win because she was pretty and scary, you wanted her to win because she was beautiful and looked mysterious and you liked to imagine that you looked rather like that, as well. Or you and your best friend both liked the same boy tribute and you stayed over at each other's houses watching the highlights and talking about romances and other boys that you did, or didn't, like. 

One year, Effie fell in love with a boy from District Four. She had almost finished school – she had passed several of her classes early and her parents being who they were had got her excused from the others – and so she started a collection for money to sponsor this boy. It began as asking her best friends, progressed as she smiled sweetly at her parents' colleagues and asked for small donations, and culminated in a parade down their street with dancing and music and banners. They only made enough to buy one dose of medicine, but the boy died heroically in the end, protecting a small girl from a Career with a pickaxe, rather than from the infected wound he'd sustained. Effie never liked the tributes who weren't heroic. She never really liked most of the Careers, because they were so much better than everyone else that it was boring. She liked the unexpected, the gentle, the ones who smiled and were polite to Caesar on television, who were grateful for the cheers from their adoring public. When they gave her the job of representing District Twelve's tributes to the Capitol, she dared to dream that perhaps she would get to cultivate one of these tributes. A sweet girl, a clever boy, shy and adoring and deserving to win.

For years it never worked out that way. Her tributes never won and never made themselves deserving of winning. Effie blamed the district. She found herself watching now not for manners, for kindness, but for ruthlessness and strength, for everything she'd once found so dull. Just one winner and then perhaps she would be re-assigned to a less sooty, less hopeless district, where she would find her true proteges. 

When Primrose Everdeen began her walk to the stage, Effie remembered her hopes of a sweet girl. When the girl's sister took her place, she was disappointed, but resolved to make the best of a bad situation.


End file.
